Halifax, the happiest city in Canada according to Twitter

Tori Floyd

The Right ClickDecember 18, 2011

If you're looking for the happiest place, just head east: Halifax has been dubbed the happiest city in all of Canada, based on what it tweets.

A group at web design company tbk Creative took it upon itself to go through one million English-language tweets and hunt down words like "glad," "happy," "joy" and "pleasant." After counting up the number of times those words appeared, the group came up with the results you can see in the infographic on the right.

The one million tweets equal about a full month of activity on Twitter, and according to OpenFile Halifax, timing could be a good reason why the capital of Nova Scotia came out on top in the survey. October and November saw lots of reasons to be happy in Halifax, from landing a major ship-building contract to an assortment of festivals and special events.

tbk Creative does add some caveats to the results, pointing out that it was merely looking at any instances of the word, not taking context into account (if you said you were "sooooooo happy to be in Halifax" with an air of sarcasm, it wouldn't have caught your meaning). The group also points out that the data is relative, looking at the percentage of Tweets and not sheer numbers.

There's also the sticky problem of differentiating between London, Ont., and London, England. tbk Creative discusses this in another blog.

Regardless of the possible problems with the survey, the results still stand. Halifax is the place to go to join other happy tweeters!